I just wrote a quick JSFL script for the Flash IDE that I though I’d share..

Example of situation where this could be useful. You just imported a bunch of images from photoshop via PSD importer. All of those would have a bitmap inside of them , that would be left top aligned to registration point, and so would be his parent.

However, you’d like to have some of those bitmaps center aligned as you want to do some nice scale in / rotation tweening like this for example :

making sure it’s on the whole pixel position (deleting .5 from x or y position)

going out of edit mode

selecting parent and moving it back by the half x and y width / height offset

repeating this for all the elements you need to have center aligned!

you can simply right-click on this link and select “Save link as” and download it to your commands folder.

On win 7 this is : C:\Users\[YOUR PROFILE NAME]\AppData\Local\Adobe\Flash CS5\en_US\Configuration\Commands

Then in Flash IDE just select desired clips on your stage and select “CenterClipToMiddle” from the menu.

It will only work on one child in nested timeline of the MovieClips you select on a stage. I have automatic rounding of position as well both for parent and nested clip, so it will always be on a whole pixel value.

Any questions or suggestions for improvement just give me a shout in comments below.

With this extension you can apply the filters to MovieClip on stage in authoring time, run this command and it will generate and output the AS2 code for you to the output window with which you can replicate the same effect dynamically.

This extension enables you to live record your actions in flash environment. It is typically used to create “live handwriting” effect. Unfortunately due to the nature of the way flash executes the actions in IDE , you can’t actually record mouse fluidly but rather short strokes, as flash pauses the on Timer events until mouse is released. So to actually create illusion of writing, you’d have to have graphics of fully written text, and use this extension to draw a mask over it, recording creation of the mask , with short strokes.

However, application of this extension is not limited to this effect, you can record any sort of animation as long as it’s happening on the stage. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine you need to import a bunch of images and place them on the frames in a movie clip. Sure flash has an import command that can recognise image sequence, but what if your images are not an animation sequence ? What if you need to convert them all into movie clips as well ? And have a different registration point other than default top left ? Read the rest of this entry »

This extension was created out of need to quickly wrap png files into swf. I was creating a dynamic multilingual website where each page needed to have an avatar popping out on a page. Of course if there’s only one or 2 you would embed them into the main swf file, but there were quite a few of them, and each of them were using alpha channel.

So you can’t use jpg files , because they don’t have an alpha channel , but you don’t want to use png, because they are too big. Obvious solution is to wrap the pngs into swf files, so you have both alpha channel AND jpeg compression.

This extension lets you select a folder with images you want to wrap, and converts them into swf files of the same filename as the sources. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several ways to create buttons in Flash. Some people will create a button class, where they’ll define all the methods for rollovers , active and disabled states and associate it with the particular MovieClip symbol in the library. The other will create a Button instance and place the graphics on the timeline under frames with labels “over”, “down” etc.

Not everybody is aware though, you can make any ordinary MovieClip to behave like Button type of symbol (i.e. going automatically to differently labeled frames depending on the mouse events). All needed is following :